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American Chipmakers Had a Toxic Problem, Then They Outsourced It
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- pcunite 9y agoAmericans aren't the problem. People are. Every type of person, whether they be male or female, no matter their skin color, race, or the education and job they now hold are sadly capable of hurting their fellow human being. Murder comes in various forms. Matthew 5:21-22
- emodendroket 9y agoIn principle I do not disagree. But if we are talking about reducing pollution not by improving processes but simply by moving production to a country where regulation is more lax then I think the headline is accurate.
- andai 9y agoIn this case it doesn't even come from hatred, but from ignorance. It's not in Samsung's self interest to give all its employees cancer, for example, for many reasons. But it happens as a result of ignorance.
- mark_edward 9y agoIt's not ignorance, I have a hard time believing Samsung doesn't know about occupational hazard and toxins. They know exactly what they're doing. It's negligence at best, at worst poisoning people for profit. edit: spelling
- pacaro 9y agoIndeed. I worked for a pharmaceutical company in 1989. The person I car pooled with worked in the "plant health" department. They had either weekly or fortnightly blood draws (memory fails) and any significant amount of nasty shit in their blood would prompt investigation at the least. When she disclosed her pregnancy to management, she was immediately moved out of lab work until she was no longer breastfeeding. So, it is possible to manage these kind of work environments safely, it's a deliberate choice to not care. Or a cultural decision that says that such things only matter for the highly paid PhDs in the lab, not for the replaceable blue collar workers.
- emodendroket 9y agoWell, it is in Samsung's interest to do that if the costs of preventing it are greater than the costs of allowing it to happen.
- ludston 9y ago> Americans aren't the problem. People are. I immediately feel resentment towards this style of nationalist defensiveness. Firstly, this is cognitively dissonant because Americans are people so you ought to say "Americans are not the only contributors to this problem". But more-so because this is a truism that will deflect attention to a rabbit-hole that is not so useful.
- mankash666 9y agoThe sidelining of employee health & safety costs isn't specific to chip-makers/America alone. It's a not-so-hidden benefit of outsourcing in general. Also, the current political climate in the US (EPA being bled to death slowly) will setup a legal climate where companies' practices that are damaging to employee health suddenly becomes legal/non-issue. It might save a few jobs from getting outsourced, but will leave behind a sick employee pool, with the state bearing the cost of health care.
- emodendroket 9y agoIt's almost comical when they pat themselves on the back for creating a couple hundred coal mining jobs, supposedly. Drops in the bucket relative to the US economy.
- qq66 9y agoWorth noting that this is a "benefit" of not offshore outsourcing, but outsourcing in general. Large companies prefer to purchase services from vendors rather than hire employees to limit their liability and responsibility for those workers' well-being. For example, a Fortune 500 will prefer to hire small janitorial services companies to service all of their offices rather than employees, so that these small services companies can ignore workplace safety and reduce costs, while the large company can say "Hey this isn't our problem" when a janitor gets injured on the job.
- Theodores 9y agoIt is not that, office cleaning is outside the core competency of a company. Hence hire the services of a company that will keep the office clean for a cost, exactly how they achieve that and with what staff is for them to manage as per contract decided on. By analogy think of the milk in the fridge at work. The company could have employed a farmer and bought land for a cow but that didn't happen, instead that was outsourced. Nobody thinks 'must own cow', that is almost always outsourced, certainly in the first world. I think cleaning services are like that, no company thinks to build up a department of cleaners, it is outside the core competency, much like dairy farming is. However, the big companies that are criticised for outsourcing departments started out in an era when there weren't so many security companies, cleaning service companies and such like. If those companies started out now they would not be building up 'cleaning departments' with the management structure, pension plan and bonus incentives, it would just be outsourced, probably to some zero hours minimum wage contractor.
- chrischen 9y agoWell of course. Where do you think all of China's pollution comes from? Comes from outsourced US production and US demand of products. Anytime there's a mismatch in laws and a lack of appropriate tariffs, it just asks for an externalization of cost and pollution.
- cnnsucks 9y agoExternalization is highly desirable to _all_ interests. The interest of manufacturers is self evident. The interest of environmentalists has a level of indirection; without the frictionless externalization available to manufacturers the process of feathering our domestic environmental regulatory nest that has been cruising along mostly unimpeded for decades now would face a great deal more scrutiny and resistance. As it is many domestic manufacturers are mostly indifferent to the regulatory state; they have no problem with the US evolving into a giant national park because they have a perfectly good alternative. This isn't some abstract concept. As recently a the 2016 election I recall video ricocheting around the right wing echo chamber of Trump opponents at Portland protests pointing out that the last thing they want to see are those 'dirty factories' operating in the US again, employing deplorables. Every single one of them was armed with one or more Asian made portable computers, but that sort of hypocrisy never registers.
- stale2002 9y agoWell, if that stuff is bad for the third world countries, then why don't they make environmental laws themselves that stop it?
- bshlgrs 9y agoHere's what Larry Summers had to say on this topic: > 'Dirty' Industries: Just between you and me, shouldn't the World Bank be encouraging MORE migration of the dirty industries to the LDCs [Least Developed Countries]? I can think of three reasons: > 1) The measurements of the costs of health impairing pollution depends on the foregone earnings from increased morbidity and mortality. From this point of view a given amount of health impairing pollution should be done in the country with the lowest cost, which will be the country with the lowest wages. I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that. > 2) The costs of pollution are likely to be non-linear as the initial increments of pollution probably have very low cost. I've always thought that under-populated countries in Africa are vastly UNDER-polluted, their air quality is probably vastly inefficiently low compared to Los Angeles or Mexico City. Only the lamentable facts that so much pollution is generated by non-tradable industries (transport, electrical generation) and that the unit transport costs of solid waste are so high prevent world welfare enhancing trade in air pollution and waste. > 3) The demand for a clean environment for aesthetic and health reasons is likely to have very high income elasticity. The concern over an agent that causes a one in a million change in the odds of prostrate[sic] cancer is obviously going to be much higher in a country where people survive to get prostrate[sic] cancer than in a country where under 5 mortality is 200 per thousand. Also, much of the concern over industrial atmosphere discharge is about visibility impairing particulates. These discharges may have very little direct health impact. Clearly trade in goods that embody aesthetic pollution concerns could be welfare enhancing. While production is mobile the consumption of pretty air is a non-tradable.
- gertef 9y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summers_memo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summers_memo
- andai 9y agoThis man is bad and he should feel bad.
- mikeyouse 9y agoIt's actually what a grad student said about a topic that Summers later signed onto as part of a broader report... and you left out the last and most important paragraph which belies that the thing was written as a satirical critique of opponents of Liberalization and of the economists who insist on measuring everything in purely monetary terms. The last paragraph: > The problem with the arguments against all of these proposals for more pollution in LDCs (intrinsic rights to certain goods, moral reasons, social concerns, lack of adequate markets, etc.) could be turned around and used more or less effectively against every Bank proposal for liberalization. There are plenty of reasons to dislike Summers and to distrust the World Bank, but you should recalibrate your sarcasm detectors if you think a left-leaning economist (he's the nephew of Paul Samuelson and Kenneth Arrow.. I mean..) earnestly wrote "I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that."
- jacquesm 9y agoThat's called an Externality. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality It's an essential component in optimizing a company for efficiency, but it carries lots of costs and they tend not to stay hidden for long.
- naedish 9y agoExcuse the OT, but I read halfway through this article getting more and more curious as to how they were going to bring the topic back to American Chipmunks. It's probably related to how much information I feel compelled to consume with less and less time that I skim text to the point of misreading key words. I've started to notice myself doing this more and more. Am I alone in this?
- FooHentai 9y agoYep this is a common issue with long-form journalism. It's formulaic in that lenghtly and relatively uncompelling prose is mixed in with a more compelling story. Arcing back around to that original (usually human interest) topic tries to keep the reader on the hook just enough to put up with the often painfully slow trickle of high-value information. Paradoxically I often find that kind of article simultaneously enjoyable and hugely frustrating. It's exactly like Mythbusters and many other shows where there's 5 mins of compelling content in a 40 minute program and they keep cutting and replaying to drag it all out.
- dredmorbius 9y agoSix ounces of potatoes in a 50# bag.
- sevensor 9y agoI worked at a semiconductor factory in the US for five years. I'm glad it wasn't in Photolithography -- that end of the fab reeked of acetone. My end had arsenic, but it was pretty well contained unless you went into the bead blast room. We also had elemental phosphorous, which has a tendency to explode if you look at it funny. Wets has hydrofluoric acid. CVD uses tons of silane, which is not only toxic but explosive. You really can't do without these chemicals if you want to have semiconductors. At best, you can stay away from the really carcinogenic resist chemistries. But just try to make an NMOS transistor without arsenic for the source and drain! Edit: This is not to say that it's OK to destroy people's health to make semiconductors. Toxic chemicals are unavoidable in semiconductor manufacturing, and we need to handle them properly even if it causes a rise in prices.
- cornchips 9y agoBead blast? Is that a type of abrasive blasting? Why? Some kind of annealing?
- Sanddancer 9y agoTo sandblast the oxide layer off the GaS ingots.
- sevensor 9y agoWhoa there, cowboy. GaAs doesn't really make an oxide, and the last thing you want to do to an ingot is bead-blast it. You want to be in a room full of GaAs dust?
- sevensor 9y agoIt's not for the wafers, it's for the equipment. Parts get coated up with various substances, and then have to get stripped back as part of regular maintenance. One of those substances is arsenic.
- ensignavenger 9y agoDo you think the company you worked for wasn't handling them properly? Do you think the industry in general doesn't handle them correctly? If so, what changes do you think need to be made?
- werber 9y agoInternational working condition and minimum wage laws need to happen already. It's disgusting that multinationals get to intentionally do this.
- sordidasset 9y agoMinimum wage is difficult to accomplish due to forex fluctuations and wide variations in relative purchasing power. Maybe an international rule requiring a minimum wage pegged to a local CPI basket? But then, I suspect multinationals would still find a way to arbitrage to the detriment of low-skill workers.
- mmirate 9y agoSo you would rather have people who lack any skills that are worth minimum wage, starve instead of being able to work for less than minimum wage?
- werber 9y agoI'd rather people who cannot take care of themselves get welfare. The concept of a skill being with less than the minimum wage is saying as a society we can tolerate exportation, and perhaps slavery
- dkarapetyan 9y agoHumanity is doomed. At no point have we managed progress and advancement without causing a whole lot of human misery. Someone always pays the cost for your luxury.
- BurningFrog 9y agoYou sound depressed. When you look at real world data it's quite clear that human misery is disappearing fast by almost any measure. Clicking around on https://ourworldindata.org/ https://ourworldindata.org/ might cheer you up.
- likelynew 9y agoI can also totally recommend reading Gates Foundation annual letters.
- gmac 9y agoIt was the best of times, it was the worst of times, ... [1] [1] https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/A_Tale_of_Two_Cities https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/A_Tale_of_Two_Cities
- dkarapetyan 9y agoI prefer to remain in my bubble of doomed humanity.
- cyborgx7 9y agoI'm starting to believe that we need to come up with some basic worker protection rights that aren't attached to the product being produced in the country in which the law exists, but wether the product is sold in the country. Stop trying to get foreign governments to enact these laws. It seems like little progress is being made on that front. Don't ask that products from a foreign country can't be sold here if the country doesn't have enough worker protection rights. Just don't let the product be sold here, if in its production, certain worker protection right weren't respected. It would mean more ethical products, and as an added benifit, it would mean less value in outsorcing, so the retaining of jobs within the country. I understand you couldn't immediately have laws as strong as you might have them locally. You want the cost of lifting the quality of life for worker to be lower than the cost of stopping sales in your country. These laws would probably have to be enacted with a similar graduality as they were enacted for local workers. I also understand that they wouldn't be easy to enforce, at first. But don't let the perfect be the enemy for the good. Propper enforcement for these kind of policies can be something that would develop over time.
- linkregister 9y agoI have also thought in the past that this would be an excellent policy to be added to the WTO treaty. It seems like a basic, necessary clause that signatories would be happy about since it protects against product dumping by ultra-polluting countries. There is probably some aspect of it that makes it too hard, such as enforcement. But most of the WTO isn't enforced anyway. Typically companies sue their national government to force them to take action under the WTO; at least this is what happens with manufacturers in the U.S.
- bykovich2 9y agoAaron Greenspan has a great article about toxic waste in Silicon Valley -- "In Search of the Cookie Dough Tree," named after a persistent smell of raw cookie dough suspended around the Wells Fargo on California Avenue. The cookie dough, of course, seems to have been trichloroethylene. https://hackerfall.com/story/in-search-of-the-cookie-dough-tree-palo-altos-hidd https://hackerfall.com/story/in-search-of-the-cookie-dough-t...
- bdamm 9y agoWow. That was amazingly contemporary.
- 9935c101ab17a66 9y agoI'm sure the overall content of this article is worthwhile, but I find it very hard to read. The author has trouble developing flow, and the sentences are often structured very awkwardly.
- dba7dba 9y agoThis is terrible. All the more because the chips are incredibly important, both for the manufacturers and us consumers. Same goes with Solar panels. An acquaintance with chemical engineering degree worked in the industry and he said it's so ironic that the ingredients for manufacturing solar panels are so incredibly toxic when the goal of having solar panels is to reduce pollution caused by fossil burning power plants.
- philipkglass 9y agoThat's not exactly irony. Almost every product has dangerous phases of production. Home exercise equipment started its manufactured life as molten steel. Baby aspirin starts its manufactured life as a bunch of acutely toxic and corrosive chemicals. You wouldn't want either of those hazards in your home, but it's not dangerous to use the final products. It's the same way with solar panels: if the manufacturer takes care, the final product has a low environmental impact. By way of contrast there is no way to use internal-combustion power without emitting a lot of CO2, even if the oil driller, refiner, and fuel retailer all devote extraordinary care to environmental and safety issues before the fuel reaches a car's gas tank.
- dredmorbius 9y agoOn that last: if your fuel isn't fossil-based, then yes, your internal (or external) combustion engine is in fact carbon-neutral. Coal surpassed wood as a fuel in the US only in the 1880s. Options for replacing current fossil-fuel use, even within only limited transport applications (sea and air travel) at present rates of use would be extraordinarily difficult, though within the realms of possibility. Seawater-based Fischer-Tropsch fuel synthesis being among the more interesting possibilities. A very long shot, but a shot.
- maxharris 9y agoIn these situations, it's important to know what the alternatives are. How much waste would there be if computer chips didn't exist? How much would there be if they didn't get faster and more capable each year? Considering all of the different things that computers make possible (from advances in medical research to improved logistics, to more efficient designs for everything), my best guess is that computer chips produced this way are quite a leap forward for overall human well-being. None of this makes me revel in or ignore anyone's suffering. All I'm trying to say is don't lose sight of the big picture, too. More and better technology (i.e., applied knowledge) is the answer to this problem. The specific form this probably takes is automation of the most dangerous work. And what controls those machines? More computer chips.
- PeterisP 9y agoThe article doesn't imply that the chip production processes should be avoided. It lists two options. First, there are alternative chemicals that are more safe but significantly more expensive, and thus will get used only if the legal system pressures the company do so, either by regulation or by punitive payments to the injured workers. Second, handling of the carcinogenic chemicals can be moved from people to machines. This is already happening with increased automation purely for cost/efficiency reasons, but can be accelerated if the companies treat it seriously enough.
- lostlogin 9y agoOften the expensive production method comes down in cost if it's used more. Presumably regulating the industry can also happen directly ("make production safer") or indirectly by allowing workers to sue for health problems.
- gloriousduke 9y agoSimilar to the idea that the downsides of globalism intermixed with potent capitalism, say ecological damage, will be outweighed by the sorts of technologically imbued powers that will take our civilization far beyond Earth.
- throw_3123432 9y agoNot surprising in the slightest. US corporatocracy has always exploited vassal states, by showing utmost lack of safety and ethics. There was Ecuador, where once Torrijos was "knocked out", the Standard Oil siblings went in and in their greed leaked millions of barrels of crude and waste chemicals into the Amazon. There is India, where Bhopal victims were paid a pittance, and continue to die from the after effects. Russia, where resources formerly under public ownership was sold off in rigged auctions to US (or equivalently Boris Yeltsin) approved oligarchs. If the American media (and probably more importantly, it's pop-culture figures) spent half as much time on introspecting as they did on selling 'human rights', we'd have a better world. But hey, a better world would mean the corporatocracy would have less money.. why bother ? Seriously though, John Perkins' book 'Confessions of an Economic Hit man' is a wonderful read for the 'conspiracy theorist'.
- linkregister 9y agoI think that book has been largely discredited. The U.S. in the Gilded Age was very predatory & imperialistic in Latin America.
- honestoHeminway 9y agoWas. Is. Always will be. Anyone who has not a nuke is in deep trouble, because there are no neutral tiles on the board that is the great game.
- ocschwar 9y agoNot so. For the last 20 years, Costa Rica's been making the kind of policy stances that used to pretty reliably get Latin American countries invaded by the Marines: 1. pro-environment 2. very pro organized labor 3. leftist economics 4. constant criticism of the US's policies by the Costa Rican foreign office Yet no invasion.
- grecy 9y agoThe developed world outsources / pushes away everything they don't want to the undeveloped world. In the US and Europe there are very strict rules on the sulfur content of diesel. (less than 5 parts per million in Europe now). The exact European company that makes diesel for that market also sells in West Africa. It is 5000 parts per million there. Disgraceful. Environmental laws should be universal, not country by country, especially when it's a company from a first world country doing it, clearly just to boost profits.